Directed by journalist and filmmaker Avi Lewis (The Take) and produced in conjunction with Naomi Klein's bestselling book of the same name, this urgent dispatch on climate change contends that the greatest crisis we have ever faced also offers us the opportunity to address and correct the inhumane systems that have created it.

Directed by Avi Lewis and produced in
conjunction with Lewis' partner Naomi
Klein's bestselling book of the same name,
This Changes Everything is an urgent dispatch
on climate change that eschews the
abstract and rhetorical in favour of the
personal and immediate. With Klein serving
as narrator and guide, the film explores
how our violent disregard for our planet has
endangered both it and ourselves — and how
resisting this abuse and opposing the forces
that propagate it can have a profound — even
revolutionary — impact upon the makeup of
our society.

Central to the film's analysis is the role
that certain mythologies play in shaping
how we view and think about the world. In
Klein's account, the Enlightenment belief
that nature is a machine that can be retooled
and reprogrammed to suit our needs has now
been buttressed (or appropriated) by the
corollary beliefs of modern-day free-market
worshippers, who contend that the exchange
of cash is the only significant type of relationship
between human beings, and that
we are all inherently selfish and incapable
of altruism.

As the film progresses these theories are
debated and refuted, not simply through
theoretical discussions or ideological
counterpoints, but through evidence gleaned
from individual cases. These range from
ranchers in Montana dealing with floods
and an oil spill to grandmothers in Greece
protesting the arrival of a Canadian
gold-processing complex; from fishermen
in India rejecting a coal-fired power plant
to migrant workers in Fort McMurray
(twenty-first-century Canada's answer to
the French Foreign Legion) drowning their
sorrows. Filmed on several continents over
a period of three years, driven throughout
by hope, This Changes Everything argues
that the greatest crisis we have ever faced
also offers us the opportunity to address
and correct the inhumane systems that have
created it.